Canter Bridge

Twice in this short prayer the psalmist urges God to move more quickly. He knows his own extinction will be the price of divine nonchalance:

Be pleased, O God, to deliver me.
O LORD, make haste to help me! (Psalm 70:1 NRSV)

And again:

But I am poor and needy;
hasten to me, O God!
You are my help and my deliverer;
O LORD, do not delay!

While he waits for God to show a proper sense of urgency, the pray-er divides humankind into that simple dualism which impresses itself upon the harassed mind as the truest description of his neighbors. Exquisitely, both parties are on a quest. One seeks the psalmist’s life. The other pursues God.

Artistry here captures in brief what in another genre fills tomes of sociology and psychology, as it should. The psalmist, faced with his demise, has little time for the details in which a more leisurely science indulges. As he’s been pushed closer to the cliff, an urgent reductionism has become his philosophy.

For those who ‘seek my life’, he wishes shame, confusion, and dishonor. These are the antithesis of their in-control stratagem:

Let those be put to shame and confusion
who seek my life.
Let those be turned back and brought to dishonor
who desire to hurt me.

On the opposite fork of his duality, he wishes for those who seek the Lord the fullest, happiest satisfaction:

Let all who seek you
rejoice and be glad in you.
Let those who love your salvation
say evermore, ‘God is great!’

Multiple ironies, like rebar running up the walls of a structure and securely tied off above the ceiling, lend stability and strength to this tiny poem. Among them is the common condition of the psalmist and those named peers who seek the Lord. Both urgently press on God to act, as though rousing him depends entirely on the volume of their cry. Seeking and hurrying become a shared assault upon the Lord’s presumed repose.

Clearly this is not a rested, cerebral statement of the psalmist’s faith. Yet it is very much the feeling of a distressed man with no alternative if God does not stop his apparent dilly-dallying. Magnificently, the psalms give us these words and urge us to pray them back to God in all their partiality and unrounded limitation. Such words are hardly exhaustive, yet they are true and reliable as far—some considerable distance—as they go.

Hurry up!